GCSE results day 2024: How to appeal your grades if you think there has been a problem

• You have the right to appeal your GCSE results if you think there has been a mistake.
• If you ask for a review and your grade doesn’t change, you may have to pay a hefty fee.
• Your exam board’s decision is not necessarily final, with one last step available for candidates.

GCSEs are often the first major exams in a student’s academic career, and today they will finally see how they did.

This morning, students who sat their General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exams throughout May and June will finally be able to pick up their final grades from school. They’ll find out just how many GCSEs they managed to achieve, and whether they managed to score any 8s or 9s - the highest grades on offer under the new grading system.

Results day can also be a difficult time for pupils who might not have done as well as they had expected. But for English students who think it’s the markers who might have made a mistake, there’s an entire process where you can get your results reviewed - and potentially even go up a grade or two.

Here’s what GCSE candidates and their parents need to know:

How to appeal your GCSE results

If you get your GCSE results back and they are much lower than expected, or you think there might be another issue with them, an appeal will need to be sent directly to the exam board that marked them. This will be either AQA, OCR, Pearson or WJEC Eduqas for students in England.

Luckily, it’s not up to pupils to figure out the process alone. The first thing you should do if you have concerns about your GCSE results is approach your school, usually a career counsellor or member of the senior leadership team. They can give you advice on your next steps, and whether it’s worth asking for a review of your grades.

If you would like to push ahead with your appeal, your school will need to go to the relevant exam board on your behalf and ask for the marking of your exam to be reviewed.

However, it is worth noting that while this is a completely free service in some places, like Scotland, English students may be asked to pay a fee if they ask for a review but their grade is not changed as a result, government guidance warns. You should be able to check with your school before they contact the exam board, but these can be fairly expensive. AQA says it charges £42 for a standard GCSE marking review, but this price can climb to more than £200 for more complex appeals or hearings.

Private candidates - such as home-schooled students - should also be able to apply for a review through the school or college that submitted their exam entries. But they, their parents or carers can also contact exam boards directly to request a review. Each exam board should have its own information page online with contact details - here’s the one for AQA as an example.

How does the appeal process work?

Once your request is sent off, the board will have someone check over your exam for any mistakes or issues with how it was marked. If they find any, your overall grade could change - but be warned, it may also drop lower than the mark you were initially given.

The exam board will then send their decision back to your school, who will let you know. But if you’re still unhappy and think there is an issue with how your grades were marked, this isn’t the end of the road.

Your school can then appeal the results of the review to the exam board once more, which will have to look through your work again and make a final decision.

If you still have concerns about the outcome, you can request a review from Ofqual - the government’s official qualifications regulator. Ofqual won’t actually review your work, but it will look at whether the awarding organisation followed its own procedures correctly, and whether it complied with Ofqual’s rules.

You won’t be charged for this service, but at the same time Ofqual says it is not able to change your grades itself. It can, however, ask the awarding organisation to look at your appeal again if it believes the it has made a mistake during either its initial review, or the appeal.

Is there a deadline to appeal my grades?

Yes, but you’ll need to check with your specific exam board online, as these may differ from one another. These are usually between two weeks and 20 days after receiving your results.

For an Ofqual review, you need to send in your request within three weeks (21 days) of getting the decision from your exam board. Ofqual needs to have appeal request in hand by then, so it’s best to send it in as early as possible.

The government has issued some advice for parents and carers supporting students as they get their exam results. This can often be a tense and emotionally fraught time, especially if things don’t go as expected. You can check this advice out online here.